Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2002 09:24:45 +0200 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> Cc: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@starjuice.net>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: HEADSUP! GEOM as default in 5 days... Message-ID: <70347.1033543485@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 02 Oct 2002 17:26:08 %2B1000." <20021002172300.V4620-100000@gamplex.bde.org>
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In message <20021002172300.V4620-100000@gamplex.bde.org>, Bruce Evans writes:
>On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Sheldon Hearn wrote:
>
>> On (2002/10/02 16:27), Bruce Evans wrote:
>>
>> > It is a devfs issue that devfs moves things into the kernel where they
>> > harder to control and more fatal if they are got wrong.
>>
>> If it's just ownerships and permissions you're worried about, I think
>> the issue could be made moot by some /etc support for devfs(1).
>>
>> In fact, as the loudest supporter of MAKEDEV, you might be the best
>> person to drive its transcription into /etc/defaults/devfs.conf. :-)
>
>I don't really like MAKEDEV. It is creating work and bugs by moving
>problems around that I object to.
So you don't like DEVFS and you don't like MAKEDEV.
Say, how _do_ you access your devices Bruce ? :-)
As various people have heard me whine about at conferences for some years
now, devices were the first thing that broke the "UNIX filesystem model".
Manually hacking a numeric index from a kernel table into filesystem
nodes is just plain wrong, it is however better than what they did before
where they hardwired inode numbers to devices.
The next big mistake was networking. The "unix filesystem model"
would have me open("/net/tcp/www.freebsd.org/80", "r"), not
socket(...), bind(...), connect(...).
I'll just silently (well, not quite) pass on the sysV IPC fiasco.
As long as we operate under the "It must be bug-compatible with
everything in the world", we will never be able to properly fix
these issues which is too bad, but that's life for us.
In the meantime, DEVFS is the best I could come up with which makes
life simpler for users, developers and administrators, and still
retains as many of the flaws as we want to keep.
Like it or not, unless you have a better alternative you'll be stuck
with it.
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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